He began at University of Georgia in 1946 and was appointed Director of the University's Counseling and Testing Center in 1947. He was interested in psychometrics and counseling. When licensing laws for psychologists in Georgia were enacted, his license was number 15.

Osborne is a grantee of the Pioneer Fund to study intelligence and personality as well as physical characteristics in several hundred white and black twins in Georgia, Kentucky, and Indiana. Osborne’s large twin study showed that the weight of genes and culture are equally as important among Blacks as among Whites. During the civil rights movement, he testified in court against school integration.

In 1994 he was one of 52 signatories of Mainstream Science on Intelligence, a public statement written by Linda Gottfredson and published in the Wall Street Journal as a response to what the authors viewed as the inaccurate and misleading reports made by the media regarding academic consensus on the results of intelligence research in the wake of the appearance of The Bell Curve earlier the same year.[1]

Osborne became a Director of the Pioneer Fund in 2000 and continues in that role.